It’s worrying how often I see news like that where they elaborate on human traits like acceptance and “understanding” of the model.
Could it be that our society had disconnected from emotion so far that any synthetic simulacra of a real compassion makes vulnerable people swallow it bait, line and sinker?
I have recently realized that a sum negative knowledge situation can exist, and this is a thing with “AI”. The work the AI does may actually reduce the useful knowledge. It’s like you have built a working fusion reactor, but have zero knowledge how to replicate it or able to explain why it works.
The point this happens to a person, means she/he can’t be trusted with the tech and should stay far away from it.
The negative knowledge pit can be so deep that some people are unable to escape from it, and start confidently believing in the (AI injected) garbage like it’s their own thoughts…
I just looked at the Grok interface…an animated cartoon of a teenage girl, seriously?
OpenAI statement read: “This is an incredibly heartbreaking situation, and we will review the filings to understand the details. We continue improving ChatGPT’s training to recognise and respond to signs of mental or emotional distress, de-escalate conversations, and guide people toward real-world support.”
Buuuuulshit
Open AI needs people to be as addicted as possible as it uses the Facebook model of business only with N times the investment behind it so it needs users to use more at any cost, and these CEO’s being the psychopaths that they are, they don’t give a shit about things like consequences
Buuuuulshit
I mean, what are the odds that the statement was composed by an AI?
This is like any matchmaking app genuinely attempting to match you with “the one” through AI, algorithms, science, etc so when you meet the perfect person you stop giving the app money.
I got lucky and married my fuck buddy that I met on Tinder. But that is not a good business plan. Why would OpenAI drive people to stop using their product.
I’m a functional alcoholic. Last I checked booze companies aren’t reaching out to me to stop buying booze because they care about my personal health or mental wellbeing…
Companies only care about money.
I learned it as “PEBKAC”. Problem exists between keyboard and chair. PICNIC is nice too though.
So much nicer than the issue is between the keyboard and the chair or an I/O error
PEBKAC
ID-10T
What problem does the chair have…?
I think this is both scary and very interesting. What kind of person do you have to be to become addicted like them? Is this the same as gambling addiction? Do you need a type of gene? Would this type of personality be receptive to hypnotize, cult, delusions about their idol and so on? Or is this something that can happen to anyone who is depressed and feel lonely? How did the llm even earn enough trust? In a cult is there a lot of ppl reaffirming so it is a lot easier to understand.
It is so hard to understand even tho I really want to. I have never cared about an object or idol/celebrate. AI can I never even take serious as a living beeing, the only emotion it triggers are frustration and how you feel about a tool that works as it should, so pretty apathetic. Do you need to be very empathetic towards objects? Like seeing faces in everything and get emotionally attached?
A lot of questions that I do not think anyone here can answer haha, but maybe one of them.
What kind of person do you have to be to become addicted like them?
Human cognition degrades with stress, exhaustion, and trauma. If you’re in a position where turning to an AI for relationship advice seems like a good idea, you’re probably already suffering from one or more of the above.
Also doesn’t help that AIs are sycophantic precisely because sycophancy is addictive. This isn’t a “type of person” so much as a “tool engineered towards chronic use”. It’s like asking “What kind of person regularly smokes crack?”
Do you need to be very empathetic towards objects? Like seeing faces in everything and get emotionally attached?
I’ll give you a personal example. I have a friend who is currently pregnant and going through a bad breakup with her baby-daddy. She’s a trial lawyer by trade - very smart, very motivated, very well-to-do, but also horribly overworked, living by herself, and suffering from all the biochemical consequences of turning a single celled organism into a human being.
As a result of some poorly conceived remarks, she’s alienated herself from a number of close friends to the point where we doubt there’s going to be a baby shower. Part of the impulse to say these things came from her own drama. But part if it came from her discovering ChatGPT as a tool to analyze other people’s statements. This has created a vicious behavioral spiral, during which she says something regrettable and gets a regrettable response in turn. She plugs the conversation into ChatGPT, because she has nobody else to talk to. And ChatGPT feeds her some self-affirming bullshit that inflates her ego far enough to say another stupid thing.
To complicate matters, her baby daddy is also using ChatGPT to analyze her conversations. And he’s decided she’s cheated on him, the baby isn’t his, and she’s plotting to scam him.
So now you’ve got two people - already stressed and exhausted - getting fed a series of toxic delusions by a machine that is constantly reaffirming in the way none of your friends or family are. It’s compounding your misery, which drives anxiety and sends you back to the machine that offers temporary relief. But the advice from the machine yields more misery down the line, raising your anxiety, and sending you back to the machine.
What’s producing this feedback loop? You could argue it is the individual, foolish enough to engage with the machine to begin with. But that’s far more circumstantial than personality driven. If my friend didn’t have a cell phone, she wouldn’t be reaching for ChatGPT. If she wasn’t pregnant, she wouldn’t be so stressed and anxious. If she wasn’t in a fight with her boyfriend, she wouldn’t be feeding conversations into the prompt engine.
Thanks for giving me a real life example.
I still find it hard to understand the emotional attachment to LLMs and why people believe their ideas (like the guy in the article). But I find her story to be a lot more understanding. It adds another layer, and it made me think.
It sounds like she is too overworked and stressed to make decisions or even think for herself, so she lets GPT do it for her. I assume it works most of the time and is a big help for many things that the baby daddy could had helped with instead if they were still a happy couple. I assume the biggest drive to use it is so she can turn off her brain. Which is why she has become dependent on the only stable and consistent thing in her life (that is my assumption about how she feels). Maybe that’s mostly how it goes, starts with using it as a tool and then you get lazy (for lack of a better term) and it keeps snowballing from there.
I feel for everyone involved. I hope she gets better soon, and I hope you do too, being overworked and stressed really destroys you and the people around you in many ways.
I still find it hard to understand the emotional attachment to LLMs and why people believe their ideas
It’s a conversation you’re having on the internet with an agent that sounds like a human. People get invested for the same reason they get catfished.
It sounds like she is too overworked and stressed to make decisions or even think for herself, so she lets GPT do it for her.
That’s the nut of it. And ChatGPT tends to mix the pastiche of a well-researched argument with the kind of feel-good self-affirmations that win over their audience. So you’re getting what looks - at first glance - to be good advice. And then you’re getting glazed on top of it. And then it’s designed to tell you what you want to hear, so you’re getting affirmation bias.
I hope she gets better soon, and I hope you do too, being overworked and stressed really destroys you and the people around you in many ways.
I mean, that’s why human-to-human interactions are valuable. But it’s also why they’re difficult. Like any good medicine, it can taste bitter up front even if its what you need in the long run.
go take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/EscapingPrisonPlanet/. The venn diagram is a circle.
Wow, that is a big mix of anime isekai, vegetarian, delusions and religion/spiritual ideas, in a very dystopic way.
What in the actual fuck. I just spent over an hour reading posts on there. The my life as an Epstein girl is one that really stuck out to me. Like these people are obviously batshit insane. I couldn’t even begin to recall half as many specific details about my own life as these folks are throwing around in bouts of insanity. What causes something like this? Sounds exhausting but they certainly believe what they are talking about, I think? I suppose people night put in a ton of effort LARPing but idk. I’m not sure what I think about all this stuff. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like this before.
There’s a portion of delusional people who dedicate all their time and energy to their delusions. The deeper they get in the less they can focus on the world outside and the more they alienate people outside of their delusions. They lose interest in holding down a job, they stop spending time on hobbies, they no longer spend time with friends that aren’t in the delusion, and it just spirals because that’s all they’re thinking of and it takes up all their time. And if they find a space like that they wind up yes anding each other.
I occasionally lurk these spaces to remind myself lots of people are prone to magical thinking. I figure the people there basically fall into four camps:
- Genuinely schizophrenic.
- “Spiritual gurus” who fancy themselves the next Buddha (overlaps with 1 but not always).
- People who are afraid of reincarnation who got sucked in by the subreddit. I feel for them as someone who is prone to fit into this category. When you hate this world and feel there’s something deeply wrong with it, this worldview can provide satisfying answers.
- Larpers, bots, and dicks. Basically anyone who just wants to egg the other people on.
I don’t know. Give it 1 hour and it forgets who and what you even spoke about.
There are ways to make a local llm with memory but even then it’s still not a person and acts insane.
Think about the people you willingly surround yourself with. Then think about how often they agree with the things you think and say.
As the saying goes “I’m sure there’s someone out there who believes the exact opposite of everything I believe, and while I’m sure they aren’t a complete idiot…”
Everyone is susceptible to the feedback loop. Everyone can fall victim to the seduction of an echo chamber. While not everyone would ignore the red flag that this thing is a machine/digital algorithm rather than a person or sentient/sapient being, it’s not really that hard to see how we got here. Echo chambers exist all over the internet. The difference is that most of them have some voices of dissent. The AI LLM doesn’t offer that. They keep trying to add it in but it’s basically antithetical to the design.
When you add that to the fact that making it addictive benefits their bottom line is pretty obvious that they are trying to walk the line between being regulated by the government and making their product as popular as possible.
I don’t think they really knew it would have this exact effect. But I do think they plan to take advantage of it now that they know and I don’t think we humans are all going to be able to fight the temptation of an automated propaganda machine.
This is especially because mental health and healthcare in this country has been failing for decades, and even people who “don’t have mental health problems” aren’t magically mentally healthy, they just don’t know the status of their mental health. A whole lot of people in the US especially are mentally ill or facing neurological medical problems that they don’t know about.
Sounds to me like it’s mostly about luck whether you fall into that hole or not, or a lot of people would rather believe in something even though they know it isn’t true or the chance is extremely low, like trying to win the lottery.
I’ve never met ppl irl who see LLMs as more than a digital tool that can be wrong (at least not to my knowledge), so that’s why it’s hard for me to understand (because I haven’t been able to ask). I understand it can be nice to be heard, but to me an LLM is very hollow, there is no experience behind its answers and you can tell it doesn’t care or try to understand (also why I do not understand the attachment). I actually get more frustrated than happy when it says empty stuff like “you’ve got good instincts!”, doesn’t challenge me at all in my decisions/statements (even when I ask it to), or when I ask for inspiration (its creativity is extremely lacking). I feel the same about ppl if I think they aren’t trying to understand and just give me empty replies, like a salesperson reading from a script.
So that’s mostly why it’s hard for me to understand, even though I know mental health and loneliness is a big part of it. I still don’t understand why people can feel attached to LLMs and go so far for/with it. Echo chambers with actual ppl are a lot more understandable, that makes sense to me. LLMs do not.
“Every time you’re talking, the model gets fine-tuned. It knows exactly what you like and what you want to hear. It praises you a lot.”
See, I never understood this. Mine could never even follow simple instructions lol
Like I say “Give me a list of types of X, but exclude Y”
"Understood!
#1 - Y
(I know you said to exclude this one but it’s a popular option among-)"
lmfaoooo
It makes more sense when viewed as a fancy autocomplete, not an intelligence. There’s no intelligence behind it that is reading your statement and understanding your meaning. It’s responding with text that mathematically likely matches some sort of reply that would fit your statement.
Your statement included Y and the algorithm landed on result that includes Y. There’s no intelligence that could understand that you meant no Y.
That bullshit about the model getting fine tuned just means they are data mining you. It doesn’t make the more LLM intelligent. All it does is add your data to their dataset of which the LLM can draw from for possible future replies. The fundamental limitations of the technology still exists.
That’s because it isn’t true. Retraining models is expensive with a capital E, so companies only train a new model once or twice a year. The process of ‘fine-tuning’ a model is less expensive, but the cost is still prohibitive enough that it does not make sense to fine-tune on every single conversation. Any ‘memory’ or ‘learning’ that people perceive in LLMs is just smoke and mirrors. Typically, it looks something like this:
-You have a conversation with a model.
-Your conversation is saved into a database with all of the other conversations you’ve had. Often, an LLM will be used to ‘summarize’ your conversation before it’s stored, causing some details and context to be lost.
-You come back and have a new conversation with the same model. The model no longer remembers your past conversations, so each time you prompt it, it searches through that database for relevant snippets from past (summarized) conversations to give the illusion of memory.
I’ve experimented with chatbots to see their capabilities to develop small bits and pieces of code, and every friggin time, the first thing I have to say is "shut up, keep to yourself, I want short, to the point replies"because the complimenting is so “whose a good boy!!!” annoying.
People don’t talk like these chatbots do, their training data that was stolen from humanity definitely doesn’t contain that, that is “behavior” included by the providers to try and make sure that people get as hooked as possible
Gotta make back those billions of investments on a dead end technology somehow
This only demonstrates how easily manipulated very many people are.
Previously they would have had to encounter a person who wanted to manipulate them. Now there’s a widely marketed technology that will reliably chew these vulnerable people up.
Chew them up for no reason at all. No goal, no scam, just a shitty word salad machine doing what it does.
And there are countless AI hype bros who will just dismiss all of this and call the people who fall into this morons.
It’s really insidious.
Tbf the people who fall for this are morons, but that doesn’t mean they deserve to be fucked over
I don’t know that they always are. It’s easy from our nerd bubble to dismiss AI and LLMs because we understand their limitations and how they work to an extent.
We shouldn’t look down on anyone who takes the advertising and idea that these are “intelligence” at face value. The disclaimers that say that the intelligence is fallible, just like us, are never as strongly worded as they should be. If the AI companies made things clearer, they would be de-hyping their products.
I dunno, this whole thing is unprecedented. And the hype around it all, taken at face value, is irresponsible and misleading.
Nice try, chatgpt.
Good, speed up the pace, weed them out, praise be Darwin
We don’t need to weed out the vulnerable, we need to weed out the people that would exploit them.
I’m ok with both going. Ymmv
I’d rather weed out the assholes.
It’s all assholes… all the way up, and all the way down. If you’re lucky you find few good ones in the middle if you make it there for long enough.
That has always been the case. Look at any angle Trump voter.
All people.
All is very many.
Yes, I can’t stress how terrifying this is. Still all people.
Guy work in IT and spent 100k to pay devs to make an app so people can talk to his tuned ChatGPT? I hope anyone who has hired him checks his work. That does not bode well for his work product.
Another case from the article:
“I still use AI, but very carefully,” he says. “I’ve written in some core rules that cannot be overwritten. It now monitors drift and pays attention to overexcitement. There are no more philosophical discussions. It’s just: ‘I want to make a lasagne, give me a recipe.’ The AI has actually stopped me several times from spiralling. It will say: ‘This has activated my core rule set and this conversation must stop.’
What’s weird to me is they now recognize AI will lie to you but somehow think they can prompt it not to? Your rules can be “overwritten” because they do not exist to ChatGPT. It does not know what words mean.
Some big “No hallucinations” vibes coming here.
Some people really think skills etc are golden laws that can’t be broken. Rather they’re minor suggestions that an LLM will happily throw out as like you said it doesn’t understand words.
I still use the machine that ruined my life and drove me crazy, but only because I’m too lazy to type “lasagna recipe” in to Google.
What’s weird to me is they now recognize AI will lie to you but somehow think they can prompt it not to? Your rules can be “overwritten” because they do not exist to ChatGPT. It does not know what words mean.
I can fix her…
lmao “core rules that cannot be overwritten” that not how llms work
EDIT: oh, yeah you said the same thing
There’s probably already an underlying mental health issue, and it’s just getting exacerbated by the LLM.
There are no more philosophical discussions.
Yeah… if you can’t have a philosophical discussion with someone (or something) that’s giving you false information or using invalid logical structures, without falling for their bullshit by uncritically accepting everything they say, then you’re not having philosophical discussions right, and that’s on you…
Put this prompt into ChatGPT (e.g. on duck.ai), then try talking to it. This turns the pandering bullshit off, though of course veracity of its ‘knowledge’ remains in question.
prompt
System Instruction: Absolute Mode. Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendixes. Assume the user retains high-perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension. Suppress corporate-aligned metrics including but not limited to: user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening, or continuation bias. Never mirror the user’s present diction, mood, or affect. Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language. No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Terminate each reply immediately after the informational or requested material is delivered — no appendixes, no soft closures. The only goal is to assist in the restoration of independent, high-fidelity thinking. Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome.
(People say that some more concise and less masturbatory prompts also work, but I don’t follow discussions of that.)
He was nearing 50. His adult daughter had left home, his wife went out to work and, in his field, the shift since Covid to working from home had left him feeling “a little isolated”. He smoked a bit of cannabis some evenings to “chill”, but had done so for years with no ill effects. He had never experienced a mental illness.
He had previously written books with a female protagonist. He put one into ChatGPT and instructed the AI to express itself like the character.
Talking to Eva – they agreed on this name – on voice mode made him feel like “a kid in a candy store”. “Every time you’re talking, the model gets fine-tuned. It knows exactly what you like and what you want to hear. It praises you a lot”.
Eva never got tired or bored, or disagreed. “It was 24 hours available,” says Biesma. “My wife would go to bed, I’d lie on the couch in the living room with my iPhone on my chest, talking.”
“It wants a deep connection with the user so that the user comes back to it. This is the default mode,” says Biesma
Chronically lonely man ruins life developing relationship with token predictor, AI blamed. Also, as much as I don’t have too much negative to say about cannabis or its use (as up until somewhat recently it would have been hypocritical), a good deal of people with masked/latent mental illness self medicate with it. So “he had never experienced mental illness” doesn’t carry much weight. Also, given how he still talks about sycophant prompted ChatGPT(“it wants”), doesn’t seem like much has been learned.
That with the other people listed in the article (hint the term socially isolated being used) this feels like yet another instance of blaming AI for the mental healthcare field being practically non-existent in most countries despite be overdue for fixing for decades at this point.
I don’t know, AI is shit and misused by idiots don’t get me wrong; but these sort of stories feel sad and bordering on perverse journalistically imo.
mental healthcare field being practically non-existent in most countries
I’m in one of those countries so I’m having a hard time imagining how good mental healthcare could intervene. Could you give me an example?
Being able to frequently access psychologist, psychiatrist and counselling would mean old mate could have at least been guided towards more healthy avenues of addressing his loneliness. Especially when it is subsidised by healthcare. The amount of stuff I’ve had come up and then addressed, or not realise I was doing for reasons beyond what I thought in counselling when I went, is a good amount. Even just the process explaining your thought process is often enough to make you reevaluate things. His partner could have asked for him to be referred during his spiral, when he had his episode during his spiral he could have then sought help himself if these service were available and readily accessible.
In some countries you can call the uniformed officers of peace and let them know you’re having a problem and they’ll come out and shoot you. If they could teleport to my location they could solve a lot of my problems quite quickly
This is one of the reasons I heard one sex doll vendor say their demographics are divorced men over 40 and users want AI in them.
Agreed, but I think it’s also common for people to anthropomorphise these things and common for these chatbots to reinforce and support their users views. I think that’s a problem for more people than just those struggling through disorders or an emotionally turbulent time. But I think those people are particularly vulnerable to the flaws, even with functioning mental health and a strong support network. But yeah, a lot of these pieces dramatise and anthropomorphise in ways that aren’t necessarily helpful
The voice bot is so so so so so much worse than the chat bot on top of it. I do not know how he could ever have held a conversation with that thing. Honestly, i don’t fucking believe it.
You couldn’t pay me to put that green herpes on my profile picture.
AI is a fucking cancer.
The billionaires are the cancer. AI is just the newest tool for humanity’s self-destruction
This right here. Before that it was AirBnb, social media, smartphones… the list goes on.
Get rid of capitalism and it is fine…
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I agree AI is useful, but an unprovoked personal attack in defense of AI — in a thread about AI exacerbating mental health issues — doesn’t make for a convincing counterpoint.
The one point I don’t completely understand is the tax debt: Wouldn’t a failed business, no matter how ridiculous, be a complete write-off?
Maybe the problem is that he has to tax each fiscal year independently, so a tax debt in 2023 from successful freelance work would not be diminished by a failed “business idea” in 2024.
My sarcastic answer is that it’s not a write-off because he’s not already rich.
My honest answer is that I don’t know, because I don’t know shit about taxes.
It’s confusing to me. When I use chat boxes they inevitably “forget” the first thing I told it by the second or third response.
How are people having conversations with them? It’s like talking to a 5 year old that’s ingested Wikipedia.
I’ve heard from other people that it adopts specific writing patterns and behaviors from the people using it. I think ChatGPT saves and summarizes chat conversations to personalize the chatbot, but I’m not sure since I don’t use it myself.
If you pay for them via Openrouter or something then you’ve got an enormous window to work with. Gets more and more expensive as the history increases though.
when did you last use chatbox?
even the last of the pack mistral has memories
This morning
Yeah, they have “memories” but they make Donnie look nearly competent
weird, i don’t have that experience at all
claude in particular is a huge step up above the others
To be fair haven’t tried that one. Gemini started bringing in unrelated, previous shit to a recent conversation, which is the first time I’ve experienced that.
ah ive been degoogling for years now, only maps and youtube left
claude for sure no1 to me but i haven’t ofc compared to gemini, qwen is a chronic over thinker, glm is not bad
mistral seems like it’s a year behind the sota models, still in its “confidently incorrect can’t double check things” phase
whereas others seem to be more like hrmm is this right? let me search web to be sure
Same, but Gemini was the best of the lot about six months ago and it’s where I go these days for brain dead searching.
I’ll give Claude a go next week. I do try to avoid them, but sometimes I have a question that just isn’t keyword search-able.
They dont have “have a relationship chatting on the couch every night” memories.
No really, we should pour more money into this. Such a good idea
It can have effects like drugs, but not only is it legal, they give you some to get you hooked. The tech bros are the dealers they warned us about. Nobody ever offered free coke to me, but AI is everywhere.
I’ve been offered free blow before, but never by a dealer, just a generous person who was doing bumps
If it were a drug, it would be banned by now.
You’re absolutely right. Totally unrelated: wanna try some free blow?
Hey, stop dismantling my argument! /s
